Tag: wealth

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There is generally speaking a list of artistic works that, despite their aesthetic greatness, are either historically misrepresentative & inaccurate or merely biased in context and coverage.

Some do justice, some don’t. Perception all depends on which angle you look at the subject. I wish for justice for all, but we must recognize, expose & bring to justice those distinct forces which cause & instigate violent political crime.

A more accurate depiction of reality in the Middle East in Palestinian film Paradise Now.

Another, more realistic representation of the ME in a scene from Syriana, which features George Clooney & Matt Damon.

How Hollywood & all of western media distorts reality through film & other mediums of mass mainstream expression.

This rather, light film depicts the similarities, and differences, between the Arab & Israeli people. But recognition of Israel implies two things: treachery to the Arab cause; abandoning the human rights of the Palestinian nation.

Is it unfair for the international community to suggest that the Jews are fine without a state called Israel? The difference between the need for an Armenian state, for example, versus a Jewish one, is that the former is completely ethnic-based while the latter is a hybrid of religion, culture and language. This makes it difficult to place importance on the need for a Jewish state while ignoring Palestinian self-determination.

Individuals like Helen Thomas get blacklisted for making comments such as those in the video below:

If there is a moral arc of the universe, it bends in favor of the Westerner & the lighter-skinned.

The reason why most immigrants to the US are less inclined to believe lies on US media channels is because they have more experience in the outer world.

That is why when US media outlets inflame the crimes of violent groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, it almost makes us laugh because in our eyes, we know that none of these groups are Islamic and that the real perpetrators are in fact some of America’s closest allies, like Saudi Arabia & Israel. The problem is the US has much at stake, economically and in its reputation. American politicians & corporate execs are involved.

That is why when the Daily Beast posts headlines about the crucifixion of babies by ISIS, it upsets me because this in fact serves ISIS’ goal of garnering attention and slandering Islam.

Why don’t CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS, Daily Beast, or even Al Jazeera America broadcast the international crimes committed by the apartheid state of Israel on a daily basis? Where are the journalists and the news broadcasts and the full fledged reports about the causes of income-inequality inside and outside America? Instead all we hear about is the dangers of “Islamic terror”, the urgency of blind, self-righteous American patriotism and unquestionable support for indiscriminate international security measures. Instead, we get stories about Iggy Azalea and Suge Knight. Instead we get headlines titled Je Suis Charlie.

The forces of imperialism currently being incited right now to destabilize universal concepts of national sovereignty, international peace and cooperation are the following: Zionism, Wahhabism, Communism, Anarcho-Capitalism, Libertarianism, Turkish Fascism & Ottoman Expansionism, White Supremacy.

We need fair coverage of world events in the US. Europe isn’t as bad as I’ve heard from peers, friends and family. But considering the US is the most influential country on the planet, for better and/or worse, it is urgent that we get a fair display of what is going on in the world here on American soil. It is hard enough for us political scientists who aren’t willing to compromise truth for the sake of riches to maintain our sanity let alone survive because the American economy isn’t very friendly to critics of its own politics. There isn’t anything un-American about it; though those in power might have you believe it does. In reality its just a group of Americans who benefit off media-bias, unfair coverage & imbalanced lobbying. It is of no coincidence that this group is likely white. Just afraid of a little competition…

The twentieth century allotted much of the global policing responsibility of the world to America. But just as England, Spain, Rome, and nearly all of history’s global empires overreached, so to has America; and the 21st century is finally time for the US to turn it down a notch. Protecting the world from extremism has turned into an impetus for exploitation.

While communism and extreme statist policies were viewed as the enemy of global stability; the 21st century has ushered in a new force of evil; anarchical capitalism. The King of Morocco once said, “capitalism and communism are two sides of the same coin.” I agree. Being a mixed economist myself, I have relinquished any desire to associate myself objectively with any particular ideology. This highlights the dynamic of the Vietnam War per se during which the US viewed Communism as a global threat therein being blinded by its own imperial ambitions. The same is true for Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion; the product of that debacle was the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the Taliban and al Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden himself with close ties to the Saudi monarchy.

The problem is there is large disconnect between the US government, Big Banks, and the American people, exacerbated by a culture and tradition of self-righteous Republicanism. Why Americans Hate Welfare, by Martin Gilens, shows how failure on behalf of the media to accurately and fairly portray the socio-economic realities within the US not only leaves the issue of economic inequality unaddressed but largely perpetuates the misery of the impoverished classes by distorting their image and the root causes of their suffering to begin with. This same principle ought to be applied to US coverage of foreign affairs which leaves various groups and communities like Arabs, Armenians, Africans, Palestinians and Native-Americans disenfranchised altogether; without a voice.

I believe only through democratic collective initiatives and progressive movements can we put pressure on politicians and the media to address public concerns. Let us honor the legacies of our predecessors like Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. who strove to balance the rights of all men in this world by fighting and protesting peacefully until our voices are heard.

First, Israel is already a Jewish state, and second, from the perspective of its Arab citizens, it’s a state that’s already seen as a preferential rather than full democracy. And passage of this gratuitous and provocative new law will only widen the growing and still irreconcilable gap between the two.

But now in the highly charged world of Israel’s political right, it’s made its biggest advances to date in the effort to enshrine Israel’s Jewish identity, as one of its Basic Laws that provide the foundation for the country’s legal and political system in the absence of a formal constitution, which Israel does not have. The bill’s defenders (among them Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu) maintain that it states the obvious, is long overdue, and is also essential to making clear to the Arab world (and the Palestinians in particular) that there can be no right of return for Palestinians into Israel proper.

“The natural and best way is for the ‘national’ character of a state to be ensured by the very fact that it has a particular majority.” And, as if taking its cue from the Zionist leader, that’s just what the Israelis have done.

It’s a Jewish state not just through declarations but through deeds as well. History, tradition, law, symbols, and practice anchor Israel’s Jewish nation-state identity through its ancient biblical connections; centuries of exilotic longing; a Law of Return; a national anthem that puts a return to Jewish Zion upfront; a flag that depicts a Jewish prayer shawl and star of David; a Hebrew language unique to only one nation-state; and, above all, as Jabotinsky had hoped, a population of 8 million, 6 million-plus of whom are Jews. It’s hard to believe that despite the secular character of Israel that aliens arriving in Tel Aviv wouldn’t quickly realize that they had landed in a distinct nation-state run by Jewish Israelis.

And yet a series of laws (most notably the Law of Return and the 1952 Citizenship Law) explicitly favor Israeli Jews. Other administrative rules and regulations give preference to Jewish and Zionist organizations in matters relating to access to land and housing. Then there is systemic, institutional, and societal discrimination that simply does not ensureequal allocation of state budgets and symmetrical benefits to Arab and Jewish communities. The clear absence of a shared public square where Israeli Jews and Arabs can participate equally and take pride in the symbols of the state — national anthem, flag, state holidays — can only reinforce a sense of isolation and separation. That Israeli Arabs may well enjoy more rights than citizens of many Arab countries and would likely not choose to live elsewhere, including in a putative state of Palestine on the West Bank and Gaza, are often arguments used to rationalize their second-class status. But these arguments really don’t work. If you are a real democracy then you make a determined commitment to try to be one, and that means doing everything possible to ensure that all citizens of the stare are treated equally in a de jure and de facto manner too.

1. Either democracy is the enemy in the sense that it is, like communism, and other collective ideologies, a method of propagating fears to suppress individual innovation, self-faith, God, diversity and success out of envy and self-asceticism.

2. Perhaps the issue is gerrymandering or manufacturing of facts, by battling democracy through republican-esque funding and manufacturing consent.

3. Israel never intent on being a democracy and can’t be do to religious and exclusive foundation thus rendering it incompatible with modern institutions and international peace. Apartheid, not democracy.

4. Keep in mind total population of Palestinians in the world outnumbers the total number of Israelis: 11 million Palestinians to approximately 9 million Israelis. (If we want to count Jews then we ought to count Muslims, which would be no comparison). Obviously, the Palestinians are not in Israel and the majority have left Palestine due to the occupation; but this diaspora of refugees would not exist if Israel wasn’t there. Democracy, or apartheid?

“Israel is a relatively young country. If you looked at the United States in 1830, roughly 60 years after independence, you would have found a nation where women couldn’t vote (and many white males, too), blacks were slaves, and native Americans’ lands were seized and tribes forcibly relocated. In a way, Israel’s situation was much closer to America’s in the 1950s, when millions of African-Americans suffered de facto and de jure discrimination. So it’s critically important to give maturing democracies an opportunity to deal with inequalities and discriminatory policies. After all, it took America a full century and half, a civil war, and a bitterly contested civil rights movement to reconcile the promise contained in the Declaration of Independence with the reality that our Constitution validated chattel slavery. And by the looks of Ferguson, Missouri, we still have a ways to go before eliminating the patterns of racial discrimination in our system.”

The question that came to my mind was: what are these ‘problems’ he speaks of?

I believe we have to separate problems into three categories: individual & collective, and a combination of the two: IC.

The individual (who believes it or knows it) respects prosperity as the sum of individual innovation and poverty as individual failure.

The collectivist respects prosperity as the sum of sharing resources.

The moderate respects prosperity as the sum of sharing resources in order to correct fallacies in human choice and to maintain a state of social equilibrium that permits individuals to compete and feel fulfilled.

Here is an excerpt from the article highlighting the author’s emphasis on the importance of a thriving middle class:

So middle out economics is essentially a 21st century way of understanding how an economy works – not as this linear mechanistic system — but as an ecosystem, with the same kinds of feedback loops. The fundamental law of capitalism is if workers don’t have any money, businesses don’t have any customers; that prosperity in a capitalist economy is a consequence of a circle of feedback loops between customers and businesses, which means that a thriving middle class isn’t a consequence of prosperity. A thriving middle class is the source of prosperity in capitalist economies, which is why a policy focused on the middle class is and has always been the thing that drives prosperity and growth — not pouring money into rich people, which simply makes rich people richer.

The first question that pops into my mind is – don’t people want to get ‘out’ of the Middle Class?

Perhaps not everybody – the argument here is that some people are content living average-income lives as long as their minimum requirements are met.

For me, personally, I thrive on my ambition to be financially fulfilled as much as spiritually fulfilled…in the mind of a conservative; whose primary focus is money (and not perhaps fulfilling his spirit; expressing himself), this Middle-Out Economics theory would seem nothing short of communism – an attempt to keep individuals where they are at in an economy.

In the eyes of the heroic libertarian, there is always a conspiracy against the individual, his enterprise, his intellectual property, and his ambitions in life to achieve success and fortune.

Perhaps the source of this paranoia is the potential for human beings to desire ‘vanity’ – that is, to desire to be regarded as exceptional beyond standard human capacity to such an extent that freedom and happiness are only awarded to those exclusive human beings.

At the end of the day, in a functional democracy – human necessities are met; but unfortunately, capitalism does not serve these means. Just as communism concentrates wealth at the top preventing individuals from obtaining a level of freedom; so to does fundamentalist capitalism.

So it goes to show that Mr. Hanauer is not far off in his critique of the dogmatic model of capitalist economics. A mixed economy, or a Middle-Out Economy, as he calls it, respects individual ambition, competition, as well as the dignity of human beings by assuring them of healthcare, housing, and a decent wage.

Wages are largely determined by supply and demand with minor interference from public factors; and the assumption in capitalism is the man who strives can create his own wealth. But this assumption is grounded in a human fear: there aren’t enough resources for all of humanity to live ideal lives; some human beings prefer to be slaves to power and economy-control; originality will be compromised.

Why must we rely on money to survive? This system has convinced us that it is the only rational one – that capitalism and supply and demand and the exchange of currency is the natural mode of human affairs; scarcity, that is, is the reason why capitalism is necessary. The USSR told us that the lies and shortcomings of capitalism vindicate the necessity for communism as its replacement.

But why is it always one or the other? Why must we worship concepts? DEMOCRACY. COMMUNISM. CAPITALISM. These are not my gods. These are the gods of the extremists; the fundamentalists; the hypocrites; the power-grabbers; the usurpers of freedom; the IMPERIALISTS.

In the East, they don’t believe in God. In the West; they believe they are God.

Somewhere in the Middle (the Middle East), are those who trust in the Infinite. The Infinite the God which we worship; permitting us to take from concepts like capitalism and communism without becoming hostage to any one of them entirely – allowing for a mixed economy so to speak.

So what does that say about the course of history as taught in the East and West? What does that mean about the twentieth century narratives? How have the East and West successfully torn apart the Middle East? How have they used these extremities to divide individuals all across the world? How have they been able to secure their empire at the expense of a moderate individualist-collectivist hybrid sovereignty?

The enemy is imperialism and its symbols and gods are evident. Its enemy is the golden rule – the straight path – the anomaly – the infinite. Instead of a mixed economy, and a national boundary – these guys want ISMS and expansion.

They succeeded in the Middle East by creating a new version of Islam which can be more appropriately labeled as wahhabism, salafism, etc. and by introducing self-idolatry and paranoia into our societies. The establishment of a zionist state in 1948 only furthered this objective by further implanting a power-house of fundamentalism, religious exclusivity and imperialism in the center of the Middle East, crashing any hopes for sovereignty, independence and prosperity for the Middle Eastern people.

Who are the victims? All the moderate secularists, liberals, and moderate monotheists who are struggling to secure their peace.

How does this translate into our tangible reality? The House of Saud and Israel as well as every other monarchy in the Middle East have allied themselves together with every brand of islamism and zionism and have secured a support system with the West (US, UK & EU) as well as the East (Russia, India & China).

There are two forces at war: imperialism (hubris) and sovereignty (equality). Choose your side.